Jeff Hardy was set for a big angle in NXT 2.0 prior to his surprise release from WWE last month.
WWE had plans for Hardy to be revealed as “The Shamon” for MSK, as first reported by Fightful. Hardy’s release left WWE scrambling. With just days until the culmination of this storyline, WWE tapped Matt Riddle to fill this role and “rush” to film the necessary content.
“Just days before the reveal was to happen, Hardy was released by the company, and Matt Riddle had to rush to film content with MSK to make it work,” the report states.
Luckily Matt Riddle and MSK’s characters mesh together quite nicely. The trio is scheduled to face Imperium at tonight’s NXT New Years Evil special.
Jeff Hardy’s WWE Release
WWE released Jeff Hardy back on December 9th. At the time, Sean Ross Sapp and Jeremy Lambert noted that Hardy was let go after refusing to enter a rehabilitation program at WWE’s request.
Just days before the bombshell news broke, the Charismatic Enigma worried fans with a bizarre incident a WWE live event from Edinburg, Texas.
Jeff’s brother Matt Hardy shared on Twitch that he believes WWE made a mistake by canning Jeff. According to Matt, Jeff doesn’t need rehab and WWE didn’t even wait to see any drug test results before making its decision.
Here’s what Matt had to say during that Twitch stream, as transcribed by SEScoops’ own Andrew Ravens:
“Before anyone rushes to judgment, obviously they [WWE] drug tested him after all this stuff, wait until you hear the results of that and when that comes back clean then hopefully people will feel better about it. They [WWE] felt like they were backed into a corner because of his [Jeff’s] history. Even though they may have jumped the gun with this a little bit, they made a decision and it is what it is,”said Matt.
In recent weeks, Jeff Hardy has been doing meet and greets with fans. Christian Cage and Ric Flair have both said they could see Jeff joining All Elite Wrestling. However, neither side has addressed this possibility in public.
